Video transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] STEVEN ZUCKER: In years
during the first World War, this art movement
called Dada began. And one of most-- SAL KHAN: Dada. STEVEN ZUCKER: Dada. Yeah. And-- SAL KHAN: How do you spell? STEVEN ZUCKER: That's D-A-D-A.
It was really a nonsense word and that's why it
was called that. And the idea was to
create a kind of anti-art to kind of challenge
what art was. The world was in flames, the
war was raging across Europe, and artists didn't want
to have any part of it. They wanted to show
how absurd and how dangerous the world had gotten. And one of the artists
who was a Dada artist, whose name was
Marcel Duchamp, began to create what we
call ready-mades, or what he called ready-mades. Some of them were
assisted ready-mades, where he would take two objects
that existed in the world and put them together. And some objects were
just pure ready-mades. And one of my favorite is called
In Advance of a Broken Arm. SAL KHAN: In Advance
of a Broken Arm. STEVEN ZUCKER: And we're
looking at it on the left here. SAL KHAN: And you had to
explicitly tell me that it was the one on the left . STEVEN ZUCKER: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Yes, I did. SAL KHAN: And so just
to make this clear, this is In Advance
of a Broken Arm. STEVEN ZUCKER:
That's exactly right. SAL KHAN: And you had
to point that out, because we have a very similar
piece on the right hand side right over here,
which I just got off of Amazon, which
is a snow shovel. STEVEN ZUCKER:
And really they're not much different
at all, are they? SAL KHAN: No. They both seem
like snow shovels. STEVEN ZUCKER: They
are both snow shovels except that Duchamp has
taken his snow shovel out of a garage, or out
of the hardware store, and relocated it, sort of
re-framed it, and said, no, this is a ready-made. This is something to
look at and to understand within an aesthetic-sphere. SAL KHAN: I'm thinking what I
think many people are thinking. OK he did that. And, I mean, it
seems like what he did was a very cynical
act, which was like, here's art for you, all you jokers. I'm going to go
buy a snow shovel and stick it in a museum. And I don't know. I feel like he's like
laughing at people. STEVEN ZUCKER: I think
that there is definitely cynicism here. And I think that this is very
much related to the objectives of Dada, which was to undermine
the way in which we valued art, the way in which
we understood art, saying that the world had
become a kind of place of chaos and a kind of dangerous chaos. And the artists
wanted, in some ways, have nothing to do
with that any longer. So how can I most undermine,
in a sense destroy the way in which
we had defined art, to create a kind of anti-art. I think that's exactly right. SAL KHAN: Was he like the
first person-- because we just talked about Warhol. And we said, oh, now if someone
took a piece of advertising, stuck it in a museum, it
would feel very derivative. But Warhol did that a
while after Duchamp. So to some degree, now it feels
like now Warhol was derivative, because Duchamp went
full-- Warhol actually had to do some work. He actually painted a soup can. But this guy, I mean he's
way ahead of his time. He literally just bought a
snow shovel and showed up. STEVEN ZUCKER: Duchamp
would say, however, that finding a
perfect ready-made wasn't an easy thing--
he went on a hunt-- and that most objects did not
suit his definition of what a perfect ready-made
made would be. He is creating a kind
of narrative here. What do you think of when you
put that snow shovel together with the title? SAL KHAN: To me it
looks like a parody. I mean, In Advance of
a Broken Arm-- yeah, he went and bought
a snow shovel, and he called it In Advance
of a Broken Arm, which is a very kind of
fancy-sounding title, which makes you think a little bit. But yeah. Yeah. [BOTH LAUGH] STEVEN ZUCKER: So I think
you're absolutely right. I think it's sort of impossible. And here's the even
more absurd part. We're looking at a
photograph, not of the original In Advance
of a Broken Arm, but actually of a
later snow shovel that he replaced the original
with after the first had been lost, perhaps,
to a snowstorm. SAL KHAN: Oh, yeah. We read "August
1964, fourth version, after lost original
of November 1915." So I guess-- STEVEN ZUCKER: Well, can
you even have an original? SAL KHAN: Well, exactly, because
there's probably a hundred of those originals. STEVEN ZUCKER: So let's
play this out for a moment. Imagine that this
came up to auction. And it went to Sotheby's. It when Christie's. It went to one of the
big auction houses. And it's a Duchamp, it's this
important example of Dada. And so the auction
is going to start at some very high number, right? It's going to start
at $2 million. But then somebody-- SAL KHAN: Is that really
what this might go for? STEVEN ZUCKER: These
are priceless objects. Except that somebody could
walk in to the Home Depot or go on to Amazon,
as we just did-- SAL KHAN: Or their
grandfather's barn or something. STEVEN ZUCKER: That's right. Imagine they could
get past the guards at Christie's and walk into the
showroom with their own snow shovel. And there would be no
difference, physically, between the snow shovel that's
up on the podium, that's for sale, that's for
auction, and that's reaching these astronomical
figures, versus the snow shovel that's worth $29.99. SAL KHAN: So that's the
fascinating question because exactly-- they are
physically identical snow shovels. And one was touched by Duchamp
and placed in a museum. And another 1,000 were not. And because of that, this
one could go for millions. STEVEN ZUCKER: So
you started off by saying, is Duchamp
being cynical? And I think in some
ways he really is. He's trying to make, in a sense,
the apparatus of the art market transparent. He's trying to
force us to grapple with how we define what art
is and how it's important and maybe that our values are
really misplaced in some way. But he's also pointing
to something else, which is that art is not necessarily,
in the 20th century, located in the practice of
its making, located in the proficiency of the
artist and their brush work. But it's located in the
sort of symbolic language that art can evoke, in the
way that art can transform the way that we see the world. SAL KHAN: So I'm
actually becoming a bit of a fan of Duchamp. And I'm also thinking of
becoming an avant garde artist. STEVEN ZUCKER: [LAUGHS] SAL KHAN: So I want to an art
installation called Breath of Air, which is I will go to
that location, that little part of volume of the museum, and
I'll just exhale right there. And we'll put a little
placard that someone had exhaled at this point. That would push thinking in art. Where the art object
does not even exist. STEVEN ZUCKER: You know what? SAL KHAN: It can disperse
through the museum. STEVEN ZUCKER: You've
missed your moment, because art was made like
that in the '70s and '80s. SAL KHAN: Oh, I missed that. STEVEN ZUCKER: You
missed it already. SAL KHAN: Someone's
already done that. Someone's literally created
art that does not exist. STEVEN ZUCKER: Or
art that exists as a kind of performative act. SAL KHAN: Oh yeah,
yeah, but-- yeah. This one's a difficult one. I mean, yeah. [LAUGHS] STEVEN ZUCKER: This is
about as tough as it gets. SAL KHAN: What's
your take on it? In Advance of a Broken
Arm-- what do you make? I mean, I agree, actually,
with everything you said, that he has
introduced this, he's challenging people's
notions of art, challenging the art market,
challenging all of these. But it's done, in
my mind, it seems like in a very
cynical way, that I'm going to put a very
mundane object on there and make people like bid on
it and think of it as art. I mean, what do you think
of this name, Advance of a Broken Arm and that it
gets all this special showcase and the fact that it
costs the same as $5 snow shovel you can
get at Home Depot? STEVEN ZUCKER: When we think
about poetry, for example, we don't worry about the
cost of the typeface. We think about where
that poetry brings us emotionally and intellectually. It transforms us. It changes us. And so it's interesting
that in the visual arts, We are still so tied
to the handicraft. Duchamp is really distancing
art from the handicraft and making it a purely
conceptual process. And so he's really sort of
forcing that issue in, I think, an important way, that
has really challenged the 20th century and made
contemporary art possible. SAL KHAN: So that's interesting. So what you're saying is is
that he's really, like poetry, poetry is really the
idea of the poetry. Someone can copy
and paste that poem. We can all share that poetry. There's no physical words there. And he kind of
did the same idea. And that's why he was able
to take another shovel and do it again and
again and again. But it's still-- I mean we say
that, but at the same time, the art market does not
necessarily view it that way. They view this shovel as being
somehow holy verses the other shovel that was made on the same
assembly line is nowhere near as holy . STEVEN ZUCKER: I think
that's exactly right. And in some ways,
Duchamp failed. In some ways, I think the
avarice of the art market has prevailed despite his
attempt to undermine it. We still would auction
this at a very high price. And we would still
differentiate the two shovels. And we would still value
one over the other. In a sense, we
heroicize the object that is somehow connected
to the conceptual, even though I think
Duchamp in some ways was really focused on
separating those things. SAL KHAN: And what
about, I mean, just going back to the name. I mean, I can kind
of buy some of this in that he's really
challenging what is art and this idea of putting
focus on something like this. But at the same time, it seems
like the title is a little bit uppity. I mean, why didn't he
just call snow shovel? Like why can't something
just call snow-- or why didn't he
just call it Blank? I mean, why did he have to say
In Advance of a Broken Arm? STEVEN ZUCKER: I'm
not going to pretend to know exactly what
his motivations were. But I think that the cynicism
that you spoke of before is exactly his point here. He's almost creating
a narrative. I mean, some of my
students have said they could imagine that
somebody slipped on the ice and broke their arm
and that there really is this sort of narrative. SAL KHAN: Oh, I
can't imagine-- we could call this piece In
Advance of a Cherry Pie. STEVEN ZUCKER: Yeah, absolutely. SAL KHAN: I mean,
I could imagine that after working a
long day shoveling snow, I will go eat a cherry pie. It would be a fun thing
to name this piece of art STEVEN ZUCKER: I think
that notion of absurdity was really central
to Duchamp's practice and what he was interested in. And I think he wanted
us to sort of bump up against the absurdity
of that title and to be challenged by it. SAL KHAN: Fascinating. [MUSIC PLAYING]